What we liked (no, really) about Alita Battle Angel

Alita Battle Angel is an adaptation of the beloved Gunmm manga, and it's a movie where anything that could happen in a movie happens. There is fighting, a fake sport, a romance and, in the center, an amnesic cyborg and his adoptive father. I sat down with Tim Rogers to talk about everything we liked unexpectedly in this movie.

Gita Jackson: Hi Tim! I do not know what you were waiting for when you went to the theater to see Alita Battle Angelbut I was not expecting much. What I've seen has completely upset and motivated me to immediately buy the manga. I think we talked about it before the release of the movie, but did you expect this movie to be as good as it was?

Tim Rogers: I expected it to be at least generally not bad and besides, uh, something that I would personally like! I mean, I have a great record knowing that I will love something. Usually this involves a complex variety of factors, although from time to time I see something that some people around me hate and I decide to put on my Good Time hat and be ready to love it. I have felt I have seen many people hate him for a year before his publication. People were screaming that his eyes were too big in this first trailer. At that time, I felt, "I'm pretty sure I appreciate that, no matter the circumstances."

Gita: We are both fans of director Robert Rodriguez, right? I was really skeptical when I saw production stills, but I was ready to give it a go. I really enjoyed From dusk till dawn, El Mariachi and Sin CityI felt as if I owed him at least one visit.

Tim: I must say that I liked El Mariachi when he was playing at the Indiana art theater in 1993, even though I honestly hated most of what I saw afterward. I only think From dusk till dawn is an end-to-end disaster, and Sin City is a nightmare. J & # 39; Love Planet terror, although! This lady has a gun for one leg!

Gita: Planet terror It was great fun. I wanted to watch it just after my release from Alita.

Tim: Yes, I love this silly movie.

Gita: It's out of control and knows that's the case, so the stakes are so high. Just pure pleasure. I have the impression that that is why I liked it Alita so many. It looked like a CW show, but where people get cut off.

Tim: Yes, I saw your tweet about it! "It's like Blade runner if it was a CW show. "

Let me however propose this: CW shows are just animated entertainment of the 1990s on TV in the years 2010. So I say with Alita it was either this CW texture or this bust, imo.

Gita: You read Gunnm right? How does the film compare?

Tim: Well, the movie presses a lot of manga for one thing. The manga is in nine volumes and the film covers, um, most of them? They reduce almost a whole manga volume to a three-minute segment of the story. I mean, they had to do it for budgetary reasons. They probably knew that the prospects for a sequel were bleak, so they spoiled it. Personally, if you showed me a dimensional portal and told me that was what was going to propel me into the world where James Cameron could do his five games. Alita series of films in 1997, I jumped directly into.

Gita: Yes, it was the initial plan, after Cameron saw the Alita animation film? Unfortunately, the world was not ready. What's interesting to me is that even though this movie is moving fast in the plot and touching all the important times, it does not feel like an adaptation of the checklist. The first two Harry Potter The movies gave the impression that everyone was going through the motions to see what the crappy fans want to see. Instead, I could be really engaged in AlitaThe melodrama.

Tim: I think the good adaptation of the manga is partly due to the fact that it is not based on something that most people in its target audience know. We should be clear: their target audience is "everyone", or more precisely "everyone watching Marvel movies". Clearly, many anime people know, love and worship. Alita. They have condensed as much manga as possible into a two-hour movie (it easily contains two and a half hours of content!) In order to be able to impress the audience with a gunfire of all relevant details and points and subplots . You have the amnesic robotic girl whose destiny is to overthrow a diabolical regime; you have an altruistic doctor who repairs the cruel biological limbs of the future free of charge for the day, and hunts day by day rogue cyborgs with a power-driven hammer as a "warrior hunter"; a motorcycle with a wheel that pulls out the legs of unlucky citizens at night to make a living, who falls in love with the amnesic robotic girl; and you have the futuristic sport of snowmobiling: the motorball! That's a lot of things, man! It may be my familiarity with the source material that speaks, but I have the impression that it was not presented too disorienting.

Gita: There is also a romantic plot.

Tim: Yes, romance is the part I see people tearing up on Twitter. The guys in my mentions like to tell me that they hate the guy Alita falls in love with.

Gita: I did not read Alita or watched the animation film, and I felt that I followed perfectly along. In fact, I'm super excited to read it now to see all the extra stuff they had to cut, because the world itself was so interesting to me. The plot is basically what you just said: you start with an amnesic robot, and then about a thousand events occur. It may be because I did not read the manga, but I personally loved the subplot of romance. It was the perfect turn of the teen movie for me. It's not profound, but it's exciting and determined as are teenage romances.

Tim: I am a 39 year old man and I thought the romance was good! I was like, "Hmm, I do not approve of this guy," which constitutes an "interesting feeling."

Gita: It's a whole different conversation, but sometimes I do not understand what people want from their movies. In a movie about a robot with knife arms, do you really expect a very clever plot?

Tim: As for robots with knife arms, the plot was very clever for me, anyway.

Gita: In addition, characterizations are primarily placeholders for accessing the action. I do not need to know the inner workings of Alita's mind to know that she is in emotional conflict with her adoptive father about her identity. It works very well to establish a conflict and then use the action to fix the problem. And the action was … pretty good.

Tim: The action was so readable. It was so easy to tell exactly what was happening in each scene. It's almost as if some movies make the action extremely invisible and unreadable, as they are not 100% sure of the overall appearance of their movies. And Alita is superb! The design of the world was great!

Gita: I loved the little details on the body that Ido gave him after he found it in the dump. Engraving!

Tim: One of my idiotic friends (he reads this: hello) was saying on Facebook that he hated how happy everyone looked in dystopia. It was sunny, as everyone was wearing cargo shorts. I just appreciated how different and colorful it was from other stereotypical dystopias. I think that sounds right with the anime of the 1990s in general. And guys dressed in cargo shorts in the background while Alita was walking around with her very richly engraved ceramic robot members, it reminded me of Final Fantasy XV, where ordinary NPCs all wear polos and khaki while four guys run in your $ 2800 runway outfits.

Gita: Even in shitty places, people live and thrive again. It was nice to see people trying to make a living even though the world was so hard. People do not lose hope when a ruling class has taken power. You are always trying to get along, to start a family, to fall in love. Much of this film is about class and trying to survive in a very stratified class system. I liked the way it fueled, but did not distract me, the awesome scenes of people hitting themselves with giant hammers and swords. Or, for example, Alita hitting a giant guy in two.

Tim: Some of the owners were ferocious! The people involved in the making or choreography of action scenes in movies nowadays must constantly compete with each other, and I like to imagine these "Hmm, how can this be different? [similar scene in another movie]? "Conversations behind difficult punctuation marks in action scenes like those between Alita and her Big Buddy Rival Guy. What I mean is, wow! Nice owns.

Gita: It was good that the camera does not confuse the action and uses digital effects such as the artificial slowdown of time to improve the action. Sometimes, the fight scenes in the movies are really showy but also very confusing – I want to know who is affected and why. Here, you can sometimes have these simple actions, like Alita kicking at someone, slowed down almost to a complete stop so you can see all the strength of the action, no not as a way to show or "look cool," but to guide you next time someone gets hit. Dude, those were good.

Tim: There was a good sticky, weird, cumbersome and semi-unrealistic mentality, similar to what Marvel films are looking for, out of the way and for a slightly more demanding connoisseur. What is it that describes this movie, I think? It's as if, obviously, they were trying to appeal to Marvel fans, because if you do not appeal to Marvel fans Cinematic Universe In Today's Economy, who do you want the money for? And while people love to scream and cry about too many sequels, remakes, or whatever, the numbers show that the suites and elements of huge connected universes make All The Money and "new" things like Alita do not make money. You can feel an idealism in this film, as one producer says (James Cameron himself?): "We are going to make a film in the style they like, except that we will impress them with history, quality and originality."

Gita: Given the surprise at the very last moment of this movie, I'm great, super want a sequel. It seems that the whole cast has The Best Time with this movie. Mahershala Ali seemed to burst. I did not think about the Marvel connection, but you know what, you're right. If it came out every summer instead of a Marvel movie, that would suit me perfectly. I want action movies that are as fun as they are stylish, with a team and a cast that loves the project as much as everyone else working on it. Alita clearly done.

Tim: Mahershala Ali! I saw this man with four haircuts technically play five different roles (two of them Alita) in recent weeks and I still can not get enough. This guy is a real movie star. I would really like that there is an alternative cinematic universe. May be Alita can regroup with John Carter and Speed ​​racer! and Valerian.

Gita: And The ancestry of Jupiter.

Tim: And Cloud Atlas. And tokens The fifth Element in there! And Luc Besson Lucy, with Scarlett Johansson, who was in this Ghost in the shell movie.

I think fans of anime, fans of games – I think they reacted in an exaggerated way and have shouted too much negativity about this film before its release. I think that they were so busy being afraid that it was hideous like that Evolution of the dragon ball 2009 movie, or boring as ScarJ Ghost in the shell, that they forgot to consider that it could be like Speed ​​racer since 2008. I think it contributed to a bad buzz, so every person who answered me on Twitter when I said that the movie was awesome really asked me "What, really? showing life, we have the chance to see their movie of vintage cartoon trailers prepared before the show. It's a metaphor and also a reality: before the show, they showed a bunch of vintage cartoons, many of which included critical quotes from James Cameron himself.

On the 2001 trailer for Rintaro's Metropolis, written by Katsuhiro Otomo, there is a quote from James Cameron that says, "The images in this film will stay with you for the rest of your life."

Like, wow, he was here, man. He and Guillermo Del Toro were present, they were watching cartoons in 2001 as if it was a thing to do for normal people. And Metropolis is a mash-up of Tezuka Osamu's manga and Fritz Lang's film, written by the guy who wrote Akira! It's a combination of interesting, strange and beautiful things that proves, if nothing else, that the anime is not totally sacred. So, what I'm saying is that James Cameron trusts Robert Rodriguez to lead Alita. Go see him today or, I do not know, look at him later on Netflix.